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I first got to know dotmailer when the company was just a bunch of young enthusiastic web developers called Ellipsis Media back in 1999. I was introduced by one of my suppliers and we decided to bring them on board to build a recruitment website for one of our clients. That client was Amnesty International and the job role was Secretary General. Not bad for a Croydon company whose biggest client before that was Scobles the plumber’s merchants. So, I was probably dotmailer’s first ever corporate client! After that, I used dotmailer at each company I worked for and then one day they approached a colleague and me and asked us if we wanted to work for them. That was 2013. We grabbed the opportunity with both hands and haven’t looked back since.

Tell us a bit about your role

I’m the Global Head of Technical Solutions which actually gives me responsibility for 2 teams. First, Custom Technical Solutions (CTS), who build bespoke applications and tools for customers that allow them to integrate more closely with dotmailer and make life easier. Second, Technical Pre-sales, which spans our 3 territories (EMEA, US and APAC) and works with prospective and existing clients to figure out the best solution and fit within dotmailer.

What accomplishments are you most proud of from your dotmailer time so far?

I would say so far it has to be helping to turn the CTS team from just 2 people into a group of 7 highly skilled and dedicated men and women who have become an intrinsic and valued part of the dotmailer organization. Also I really enjoy being part of the Senior Technical Management team. Here we have the ability to influence the direction and structure of the platform on a daily basis.

Meet Darryl Clark – the cheese and peanut butter sandwich lover

Can you speak a bit about your background and that of your team? What experience and expertise is required to join this team?

My background is quite diverse from a stint in the Army, through design college, web development, business analysis to heading up my current teams. I would say the most valuable skill that I have is being highly analytical. I love nothing more than listening to a client’s requirements and digging deep to work out how we can answer these if not exceed them.

As a team, we love nothing more than brainstorming our ideas. Every member has a valid input and we listen. Everyone has the opportunity to influence what we do and our motto is “there is no such thing as a stupid question.”

To work in my teams you have to be analytical but open minded to the fact that other people may have a better answer than you. Embrace other people’s input and use it to give our clients the best possible solution. We are hugely detail conscious, but have to be acutely aware that we need to tailor what we say to our audience so being able to talk to anyone at any level is hugely valuable.

How much of the dotmailer platform is easily customizable and when does it cross over into something that requires your team’s expertise? How much time is spent on these custom solutions one-time or ongoing?

I’ll let you in on a little secret here. We don’t actually do anything that our customers can’t do with dotmailer given the right knowledge and resources. This is because we build all of our solutions using the dotmailer public API. The API has hundreds of methods in both SOAP and REST versions, which allows you to do a huge amount with the dotmailer platform. We do have a vast amount of experience and knowledge in the team so we may well be able to build a solution quicker than our customers. We are more than happy to help them and their development teams build a solution using us on a consultancy basis to lessen the steepness of the learning curve.

Our aim when building a solution for a customer is that it runs silently in the background and does what it should without any fuss.

What are your plans for the Custom Tech Solutions team going forward?

The great thing about Custom Technical Solutions is you never know what is around the corner as our customers have very diverse needs. What we are concentrating on at the moment is refining our processes to ensure that they are as streamlined as possible and allow us to give as much information to the customer as we can. We are also always looking at the technology and coding approaches that we use to make sure that we build the most innovative and robust solutions.

We are also looking at our external marketing and sharing our knowledge through blogs so keep an eye on the website for our insights.

What are the most common questions that you get when speaking to a prospective customer?

Most questions seem to revolve around reassurance such as “Have you done this before?”, “How safe is my data?”, “What about security?”, “Can you talk to my developers?”, “Do I need to do anything?”. In most instances, we are the ones asking the questions as we need to find out information as soon as possible so that we can analyse it to ensure that we have the right detail to provide the right solution.

Can you tell us about the dotmailer differentiators you highlight when speaking to prospective customers that seem to really resonate?

We talk a lot about working with best of breed so for example a customer can use our Channel Extensions in automation programs to fire out an SMS to a contact using their existing provider. We don’t force customers down one route, we like to let them decide for themselves.

Also, I really like to emphasize the fact that there is always more than one way to do something within the dotmailer platform. This means we can usually find a way to do something that works for a client within the platform. If not, then we call in CTS to work out if there is a way that we can build something that will — whether this is automating uploads for a small client or mass sending from thousands of child accounts for an enterprise level one.

What do you see as the future of marketing automation technology? Will one size ever fit all? Or more customization going forward?

The 64 million dollar question. One size will never fit all. Companies and their systems are too organic for that. There isn’t one car that suits every driver or one racquet that suits every sport. Working with a top drawer partner network and building our system to be as open as possible from an integration perspective means that our customers can make dotmailer mold to their business and not the other way round…and adding to that the fact that we are building lots of features in the platform that will blow your socks off.

I’m a dyed in the wool Gooner (aka Arsenal Football Club fan) thanks to my Grandfather leading me down the right path as a child. If you are still reading this after that bombshell, then food-wise I pretty much like everything apart from coriander which as far as I’m concerned is the Devils own spawn. I don’t really have a favorite band, but am partial to a bit of Level 42 and Kings of Leon and you will also find me listening to 90s drum and bass and proper old school hip hop. My favorite holiday destination is any decent villa that I can relax in and spend time with my family and I went to Paris recently and loved that. Guilty pleasure – well that probably has to be confessing to liking Coldplay or the fact that my favorite sandwich is peanut butter, cheese and salad cream. Go on try it, you’ll love it.

There’s no doubt that quite a bit has changed about SEO, and that the field is far more integrated with other aspects of online marketing than it once was. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand pushes back against the idea that effective modern SEO doesn’t require any technical expertise, outlining a fantastic list of technical elements that today’s SEOs need to know about in order to be truly effective.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I’m going to do something unusual. I don’t usually point out these inconsistencies or sort of take issue with other folks’ content on the web, because I generally find that that’s not all that valuable and useful. But I’m going to make an exception here.

There is an article by Jayson DeMers, who I think might actually be here in Seattle — maybe he and I can hang out at some point — called “Why Modern SEO Requires Almost No Technical Expertise.” It was an article that got a shocking amount of traction and attention. On Facebook, it has thousands of shares. On LinkedIn, it did really well. On Twitter, it got a bunch of attention.

Some folks in the SEO world have already pointed out some issues around this. But because of the increasing popularity of this article, and because I think there’s, like, this hopefulness from worlds outside of kind of the hardcore SEO world that are looking to this piece and going, “Look, this is great. We don’t have to be technical. We don’t have to worry about technical things in order to do SEO.”

Look, I completely get the appeal of that. I did want to point out some of the reasons why this is not so accurate. At the same time, I don’t want to rain on Jayson, because I think that it’s very possible he’s writing an article for Entrepreneur, maybe he has sort of a commitment to them. Maybe he had no idea that this article was going to spark so much attention and investment. He does make some good points. I think it’s just really the title and then some of the messages inside there that I take strong issue with, and so I wanted to bring those up.

First off, some of the good points he did bring up.

One, he wisely says, “You don’t need to know how to code or to write and read algorithms in order to do SEO.” I totally agree with that. If today you’re looking at SEO and you’re thinking, “Well, am I going to get more into this subject? Am I going to try investing in SEO? But I don’t even know HTML and CSS yet.”

Those are good skills to have, and they will help you in SEO, but you don’t need them. Jayson’s totally right. You don’t have to have them, and you can learn and pick up some of these things, and do searches, watch some Whiteboard Fridays, check out some guides, and pick up a lot of that stuff later on as you need it in your career. SEO doesn’t have that hard requirement.

And secondly, he makes an intelligent point that we’ve made many times here at Moz, which is that, broadly speaking, a better user experience is well correlated with better rankings.

You make a great website that delivers great user experience, that provides the answers to searchers’ questions and gives them extraordinarily good content, way better than what’s out there already in the search results, generally speaking you’re going to see happy searchers, and that’s going to lead to higher rankings.

But not entirely. There are a lot of other elements that go in here. So I’ll bring up some frustrating points around the piece as well.

First off, there’s no acknowledgment — and I find this a little disturbing — that the ability to read and write code, or even HTML and CSS, which I think are the basic place to start, is helpful or can take your SEO efforts to the next level. I think both of those things are true.

So being able to look at a web page, view source on it, or pull up Firebug in Firefox or something and diagnose what’s going on and then go, “Oh, that’s why Google is not able to see this content. That’s why we’re not ranking for this keyword or term, or why even when I enter this exact sentence in quotes into Google, which is on our page, this is why it’s not bringing it up. It’s because it’s loading it after the page from a remote file that Google can’t access.” These are technical things, and being able to see how that code is built, how it’s structured, and what’s going on there, very, very helpful.

Some coding knowledge also can take your SEO efforts even further. I mean, so many times, SEOs are stymied by the conversations that we have with our programmers and our developers and the technical staff on our teams. When we can have those conversations intelligently, because at least we understand the principles of how an if-then statement works, or what software engineering best practices are being used, or they can upload something into a GitHub repository, and we can take a look at it there, that kind of stuff is really helpful.

Secondly, I don’t like that the article overly reduces all of this information that we have about what we’ve learned about Google. So he mentions two sources. One is things that Google tells us, and others are SEO experiments. I think both of those are true. Although I’d add that there’s sort of a sixth sense of knowledge that we gain over time from looking at many, many search results and kind of having this feel for why things rank, and what might be wrong with a site, and getting really good at that using tools and data as well. There are people who can look at Open Site Explorer and then go, “Aha, I bet this is going to happen.” They can look, and 90% of the time they’re right.

So he boils this down to, one, write quality content, and two, reduce your bounce rate. Neither of those things are wrong. You should write quality content, although I’d argue there are lots of other forms of quality content that aren’t necessarily written — video, images and graphics, podcasts, lots of other stuff.

And secondly, that just doing those two things is not always enough. So you can see, like many, many folks look and go, “I have quality content. It has a low bounce rate. How come I don’t rank better?” Well, your competitors, they’re also going to have quality content with a low bounce rate. That’s not a very high bar.

Also, frustratingly, this really gets in my craw. I don’t think “write quality content” means anything. You tell me. When you hear that, to me that is a totally non-actionable, non-useful phrase that’s a piece of advice that is so generic as to be discardable. So I really wish that there was more substance behind that.

The article also makes, in my opinion, the totally inaccurate claim that modern SEO really is reduced to “the happier your users are when they visit your site, the higher you’re going to rank.”

Wow. Okay. Again, I think broadly these things are correlated. User happiness and rank is broadly correlated, but it’s not a one to one. This is not like a, “Oh, well, that’s a 1.0 correlation.”

I would guess that the correlation is probably closer to like the page authority range. I bet it’s like 0.35 or something correlation. If you were to actually measure this broadly across the web and say like, “Hey, were you happier with result one, two, three, four, or five,” the ordering would not be perfect at all. It probably wouldn’t even be close.

There’s a ton of reasons why sometimes someone who ranks on Page 2 or Page 3 or doesn’t rank at all for a query is doing a better piece of content than the person who does rank well or ranks on Page 1, Position 1.

Then the article suggests five and sort of a half steps to successful modern SEO, which I think is a really incomplete list. So Jayson gives us;

Good on-site experience

Writing good content

Getting others to acknowledge you as an authority

Rising in social popularity

Earning local relevance

Dealing with modern CMS systems (which he notes most modern CMS systems are SEO-friendly)

The thing is there’s nothing actually wrong with any of these. They’re all, generally speaking, correct, either directly or indirectly related to SEO. The one about local relevance, I have some issue with, because he doesn’t note that there’s a separate algorithm for sort of how local SEO is done and how Google ranks local sites in maps and in their local search results. Also not noted is that rising in social popularity won’t necessarily directly help your SEO, although it can have indirect and positive benefits.

I feel like this list is super incomplete. Okay, I brainstormed just off the top of my head in the 10 minutes before we filmed this video a list. The list was so long that, as you can see, I filled up the whole whiteboard and then didn’t have any more room. I’m not going to bother to erase and go try and be absolutely complete.

But there’s a huge, huge number of things that are important, critically important for technical SEO. If you don’t know how to do these things, you are sunk in many cases. You can’t be an effective SEO analyst, or consultant, or in-house team member, because you simply can’t diagnose the potential problems, rectify those potential problems, identify strategies that your competitors are using, be able to diagnose a traffic gain or loss. You have to have these skills in order to do that.

I’ll run through these quickly, but really the idea is just that this list is so huge and so long that I think it’s very, very, very wrong to say technical SEO is behind us. I almost feel like the opposite is true.

We have to be able to understand things like;

Content rendering and indexability

Crawl structure, internal links, JavaScript, Ajax. If something’s post-loading after the page and Google’s not able to index it, or there are links that are accessible via JavaScript or Ajax, maybe Google can’t necessarily see those or isn’t crawling them as effectively, or is crawling them, but isn’t assigning them as much link weight as they might be assigning other stuff, and you’ve made it tough to link to them externally, and so they can’t crawl it.

Disabling crawling and/or indexing of thin or incomplete or non-search-targeted content. We have a bunch of search results pages. Should we use rel=prev/next? Should we robots.txt those out? Should we disallow from crawling with meta robots? Should we rel=canonical them to other pages? Should we exclude them via the protocols inside Google Webmaster Tools, which is now Google Search Console?

Managing redirects, domain migrations, content updates. A new piece of content comes out, replacing an old piece of content, what do we do with that old piece of content? What’s the best practice? It varies by different things. We have a whole Whiteboard Friday about the different things that you could do with that. What about a big redirect or a domain migration? You buy another company and you’re redirecting their site to your site. You have to understand things about subdomain structures versus subfolders, which, again, we’ve done another Whiteboard Friday about that.

Proper error codes, downtime procedures, and not found pages. If your 404 pages turn out to all be 200 pages, well, now you’ve made a big error there, and Google could be crawling tons of 404 pages that they think are real pages, because you’ve made it a status code 200, or you’ve used a 404 code when you should have used a 410, which is a permanently removed, to be able to get it completely out of the indexes, as opposed to having Google revisit it and keep it in the index.

Downtime procedures. So there’s specifically a… I can’t even remember. It’s a 5xx code that you can use. Maybe it was a 503 or something that you can use that’s like, “Revisit later. We’re having some downtime right now.” Google urges you to use that specific code rather than using a 404, which tells them, “This page is now an error.”

Disney had that problem a while ago, if you guys remember, where they 404ed all their pages during an hour of downtime, and then their homepage, when you searched for Disney World, was, like, “Not found.” Oh, jeez, Disney World, not so good.

International and multi-language targeting issues. I won’t go into that. But you have to know the protocols there. Duplicate content, syndication, scrapers. How do we handle all that? Somebody else wants to take our content, put it on their site, what should we do? Someone’s scraping our content. What can we do? We have duplicate content on our own site. What should we do?

Diagnosing traffic drops via analytics and metrics. Being able to look at a rankings report, being able to look at analytics connecting those up and trying to see: Why did we go up or down? Did we have less pages being indexed, more pages being indexed, more pages getting traffic less, more keywords less?

Understanding advanced search parameters. Today, just today, I was checking out the related parameter in Google, which is fascinating for most sites. Well, for Moz, weirdly, related:oursite.com shows nothing. But for virtually every other sit, well, most other sites on the web, it does show some really interesting data, and you can see how Google is connecting up, essentially, intentions and topics from different sites and pages, which can be fascinating, could expose opportunities for links, could expose understanding of how they view your site versus your competition or who they think your competition is.

Then there are tons of parameters, like in URL and in anchor, and da, da, da, da. In anchor doesn’t work anymore, never mind about that one.

I have to go faster, because we’re just going to run out of these. Like, come on. Interpreting and leveraging data in Google Search Console. If you don’t know how to use that, Google could be telling you, you have all sorts of errors, and you don’t know what they are.

Leveraging topic modeling and extraction. Using all these cool tools that are coming out for better keyword research and better on-page targeting. I talked about a couple of those at MozCon, like MonkeyLearn. There’s the new Moz Context API, which will be coming out soon, around that. There’s the Alchemy API, which a lot of folks really like and use.

Identifying and extracting opportunities based on site crawls. You run a Screaming Frog crawl on your site and you’re going, “Oh, here’s all these problems and issues.” If you don’t have these technical skills, you can’t diagnose that. You can’t figure out what’s wrong. You can’t figure out what needs fixing, what needs addressing.

Using rich snippet format to stand out in the SERPs. This is just getting a better click-through rate, which can seriously help your site and obviously your traffic.

Applying Google-supported protocols like rel=canonical, meta description, rel=prev/next, hreflang, robots.txt, meta robots, x robots, NOODP, XML sitemaps, rel=nofollow. The list goes on and on and on. If you’re not technical, you don’t know what those are, you think you just need to write good content and lower your bounce rate, it’s not going to work.

Using APIs from services like AdWords or MozScape, or hrefs from Majestic, or SEM refs from SearchScape or Alchemy API. Those APIs can have powerful things that they can do for your site. There are some powerful problems they could help you solve if you know how to use them. It’s actually not that hard to write something, even inside a Google Doc or Excel, to pull from an API and get some data in there. There’s a bunch of good tutorials out there. Richard Baxter has one, Annie Cushing has one, I think Distilled has some. So really cool stuff there.

Diagnosing page load speed issues, which goes right to what Jayson was talking about. You need that fast-loading page. Well, if you don’t have any technical skills, you can’t figure out why your page might not be loading quickly.

Diagnosing mobile friendliness issues

Advising app developers on the new protocols around App deep linking, so that you can get the content from your mobile apps into the web search results on mobile devices. Awesome. Super powerful. Potentially crazy powerful, as mobile search is becoming bigger than desktop.

Okay, I’m going to take a deep breath and relax. I don’t know Jayson’s intention, and in fact, if he were in this room, he’d be like, “No, I totally agree with all those things. I wrote the article in a rush. I had no idea it was going to be big. I was just trying to make the broader points around you don’t have to be a coder in order to do SEO.” That’s completely fine.

So I’m not going to try and rain criticism down on him. But I think if you’re reading that article, or you’re seeing it in your feed, or your clients are, or your boss is, or other folks are in your world, maybe you can point them to this Whiteboard Friday and let them know, no, that’s not quite right. There’s a ton of technical SEO that is required in 2015 and will be for years to come, I think, that SEOs have to have in order to be effective at their jobs.

All right, everyone. Look forward to some great comments, and we’ll see you again next time for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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Given Google’s recent changes to SERPs and their April 21 mobile deadline, does SEO still come first? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks you through tactics you can use to build a loyal audience before you need to do SEO.

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting on some of the changes that Google has made that are forcing marketers to invest more and more in building loyal audiences before they do SEO. This is kind of a reverse of years past where we could use SEO as that initial channel where we attracted visits who would become our customers, our email subscribers, our social media fans and followers. All of these things have kind of switched direction.

Why move SEO later in the process?

There are some reasons why. First off, Google has for a lot of broad, head of the demand curve queries, they’ve taken some of the value and equity away from those with things like instant answers and Knowledge Graph, along with lots and lots of other verticals.

Knowledge Graph

I do a search for “plaid shirts” and I get this instant answer showing me what a plaid shirt looks like and a Knowledge Graph. This is a fake example. I don’t think they actually do this for plaid shirts yet, but they will.

Personalization

Personalization by history, we’re seeing a ton of personalization. I think history is one of the biggest influencers on personalization. Google+ still is a little bit, but your search history and what you’ve clicked on in the past tends to be big predictors of this. You can see this in two areas, not just in the results that Google shows, but also in what they’re suggesting to you in your Search Suggest as you type.

Now, where Google is trying to predictively say, “Hey, we think you’re going to want coffee right now because we see that you stepped out of your office and you live in Seattle, and you are a human being. So you must want coffee.” They have these ranking signals, that are relatively new over the past few years and certainly much stronger than in years past around user and usage data, around search volume and what you searched for using quality raters and human and manual controls. Signals that are heavily correlated with brand, even if brand itself isn’t necessarily a ranking factor.

Fewer results

Of course, there are fewer results now. I don’t know if you guys caught this, but I thought one of the most fascinating things that Dr. Pete showed off recently in his MozCast data set was that it used to be the case that Google would show 10 results even if they had a set of images, a news result, and a local pack. Now basically these count as individual results. So you’re not getting 10 results on a page. If you’ve got images and a couple of news things, you’re getting seven results that are web results. Ten domains appear, ten big domains, powerful domains, places like Amazon and Yelp and those kinds of things, at least for U.S. search results, appear on 17% of all page one queries. There are a little fewer results to work with and more results biased to these bigger, better-known sites.

All of these things are contributing to this world in which doing SEO first and then earning loyalty through two other channels through SEO is really, really hard. It’s making the value of having a loyal audience before you need to do SEO that much more valuable, which is why I figured we’d run through some of the tactics that you can use to build a loyal audience.

This is actually a question from one of our Whiteboard Friday loyal audience members. Thank you very much. Much appreciated.

How to build a loyal audience

Some tactics to build loyalty, we talked about a few of these, but creating an expectation that you can consistently deliver upon is a huge part of how loyalty is created. Humans love to form habits. Thankfully for marketers, we’re terrible at breaking those habits.

Consistency

If you can form a habit, you can create a loyal member of your audience, but this is very challenging unless you deliver consistency. That consistency needs to be created through an expectation. That could be when you publish. That could be what you’re going to do. That could be the format of the content that you’re providing. That could be how your solution or problem or product is delivered. But it needs to create those things in order to build that loyal audience.

Reach your audience where they are

Secondly, provide your content through the channels, the apps, the accounts, the formats that your audience is already using. If I say, “Hey, in order to get Whiteboard Friday, you need to sign up for a Moz account first,” the viewability of Whiteboard Friday is going to go down. If on the other hand, which we don’t have this but we really should have it, there was a subscribe on iTunes and you could get each Whiteboard Friday as a podcast, gosh, that is something that many Whiteboard Friday viewers, in fact, many people in the technology and marketing worlds already have access to. Therefore it reduces the friction of subscribing to Whiteboard Friday. We might build more people into our loyal audience.

This is definitely something to think about. You need to be able to identify those channels and then be there.

Where SEO fits

I’m saying don’t start with SEO as your primary web marketing tactic anymore. I think we have to build into it. These challenges are too great. Not only are they too great, I think they could be overcome today, but they are growing. All of them are growing so substantially, instant answers and Knowledge Graph are becoming a bigger and bigger part of search results. Google Now is something that Google is pushing on so incredibly hard. I think they’re going to be pushing it with new devices. They’re clearly pushing it with app results inside of search results. I think these ranking signals are only going to get stronger. I think there’s going to be more personalization. I think every one of these you can see an up and to the right trend.

Therefore, when we do SEO, we have to think about it as, “How do I earn a loyal audience and then use their amplification to help me perform in search?” Rather than, “How do I do SEO for my website to earn visitors that I can convert into a loyal audience?” That’s a new a challenge, a new paradigm for us.

Be unique and memorable

Craft a stylistically unique and memorable approach to solving your audience’s problem. One of the things that I find is challenging in a lot of businesses that we talk to, that I get to interact with is that they think, “Hey, we’re the best player in this field. We’re the best at doing this. Therefore, we should be able to earn a great customer audience.” I think this ignores why marketing exists and ignores the power that marketing has and the power of influencing human beings overall.

The best really is not necessarily enough. We are not perfectly logical creatures where we go, “Hey, I am thinking about a new social media monitoring solution. I need to watch Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram for my business. Therefore I’m going to create my criteria. I’m going to evaluate all 716 providers that are in the market today that fit my price range and those criteria. Then I’m going to choose effectively the best one. No, we’re biased by the ones we’ve heard of, the ones our friends recommend, the ones we stumble across versus don’t stumble across, the ones that have a loud voice, the ones that have a credible voice. These things bias us. Therefore, being stylistically unique and memorable have outsized power to determine whether people will become part of your loyal audience.

More isn’t necessarily better

I’ve talked about this a few times, but I’m strongly of the opinion, especially when it comes to loyalty, that more content may actually be worse than better content. Moz publishes between 7 and 10 blog posts a week. That’s a lot of content. I think there are weeks where we published 12 blog posts. For me to say this is a little odd. But the challenge here is prior to building a loyal audience. Once you have a loyal audience, you can start to expand that audience by reaching out and broadening the spectrum of content that you create, and you can afford to be a little more risk taking in that. When you are trying to build loyalty early on, you need to have that consistency of quality.

People are going to return because you keep delivering great stuff again and again. When that suffers, your audience will suffer as well. If I watch my first three Whiteboard Fridays and then the fourth one is not great, I expect to lose a ton of those viewers. But if I have tens of thousands of people who are watching Whiteboard Friday and I deliver one bad one out of twenty, maybe I have a little more room to play there.

Focus your efforts

Focus. This is a big challenge because I think a lot of us think very broadly about who we want to appeal to, the types of content we want to create, the types of marketing we want to do. This is very challenging from a loyalty perspective because passionate fans tend to congregate around very, very focused causes and very focused creators of content or focused brands or focused organizations. Its much tougher to build that passion into a group of users if you’re trying to appeal to a very broad set. That’s just how it is.

Don’t forget engagement

Lastly, but not least, this is very tactical, but I found it extremely powerful when a brand is starting out, when a project is starting out, to engage and respond as much as possible with your customers. That could be over social channels, that could be in comments, that could be in emails, that could be directly in outreach, whatever it is. But if you see someone who you can reach out to engaging with you, replying to them, talking to them, conversing with them in some way, forming a connection is extremely powerful. It especially is important for first interactions.

I’m not going to say, “You need to respond to everything all the time, always.” If you can identify, “This is the first interaction that we’ve had with this person,” if you interact and if that interaction is positive, it can create loyalty just on its own. That’s a lovely way to start scaling up from a small starting point.

All right everyone, hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’ll see you again next week. Take care.

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Let’s face it: Local link building is hard. Even if you have the budget and resources needed to earn or build links it will take time. Having a strong link profile is essential to your website’s success in search engines.

If you’re new to link building and want to develop a more in-depth understanding, check out this great resource from MOZ on link buildinghere.

In this guide we will look at11 practical ways you can start earning links for your local business, which will make an impact on your bottom line today.

Who should care about local link building?

When I talk about local link building I don’t mean that these links are for local businesses exclusively. If you’re trying to boost the authority of your website, one good way is to get links from locally relevant sources.This guide is for all types of businesses who want to increase their site’s link authority.

Since local business types vary from fast food restaurants, to ski rental shops, to law firms, and everything in-between, the tactics below are applicable across the spectrum.

About these links

Some of these links are harder to get than others. While it’s easy to start with the low hanging fruit, you should put a plan together to go after the harder ones. These are the links your competitors won’t get because they’re just too darn lazy. This is how real businesses set themselves apart in the customer’s eyes and the search engine’s eyes and build a brand that’s worth remembering. Aim for quality over quantity and don’t settle for crummy links.

How do you define a good link?

I recently read an article by Eric Enge from Stonetemple that summed up what type of links you should be looking for pretty nicely. In this article he mentioned three key points to help define the type of links you’re looking for. They were:

Links that will drive direct referral traffic

Links that build visibility with your target audience for your brand

Links that build your reputation

The link building methods I’ll be covering today will achieve at least one of the goals each. I always think it’s important to “think outside of the link” and the above three points make that practical. In addition to getting the link for an SEO benefit, will it actually drive relevant traffic? If so, that’s a great link to chase. The same goes for links built that place you in front of your target audience and links that build your reputation.

Keeping this in mind, lets build some links!

#1 Create controversy and get in the news

Creating a controversial story may seem hard at first glance, but it reminds me of this quote from Peter Marshall“If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.” If your clients don’t have any controversy or a cause to believe in, then they aren’t real people.

You can’t agree with 100% of the people 100% of the time and you just have to find out what that is. Some companies like Spirit Airlines seem to do this quite often, but the little guys can do this too with minimal investment.

Using this method you can get links from places like:

The Wall Street Journal, The Denver Post and other local newspapers, Lexis Nexis

Actual case study

We were recently working with an attorney who was looking to earn links at a decent scale. We proposed a scholarship contest. While scholarship links from .edus are cool, we likeThe Wall Street Journal and high authority news site links even more. After speaking with this client, who is a DUI attorney, we discussed how everybody talks about how destructive driving drunk is, but rarely do people admit to the habit.

From this idea, we came up with the concept ofa Scholarship for Colorado students who admit to drinking and driving.

After the scholarship information was published on the site, we reached out to our local newspaper,The Denver Post, and informed them of the scholarship. From here, they went on to interview our client and write an article on the topic titled “Scholarship for Colorado students who admit to drinking and driving” that links to the scholarship page.

Once theDenver Post article was published, it was easy to get other major publications to cover the story, including The Wall Street Journal:

How you can do this

Step 1: Develop an idea that strikes a chord with people. Think about issues that are universally familiar and tend to be polarizing in some way.

Step 2: Develop the on-page asset needed to support it. In this case we opted for the scholarship.

Step 3: Once the asset is created, pitch it to a local newspaper.

Step 4: If the story is picked up by a newspaper you can then pitch it to other major publications like The Wall Street Journal. Many websites have contact forms and areas to submit a tip. Something simple like “Hey I thought you guys might find this funny” with a link to the news publication article will do the trick since it adds credibility.

Step 5: Share it on social media with groups that might be interested in the topic.

Step 6: Consider paying for some exposure on Outbrain to widen the audience.

PRO tip: Don’t skimp on the content, graphics, or any step in this process. This will be fruitful if done right but will fall flat on your face if you try to take shortcuts.

#2 Easily get contest nomination links

Almost every city whether big or small has some type of local business awards. The awards might be run by a small local newspaper with a website, the chamber of commerce, or even another organization. In addition to these“Best Of” type awards, there are also awards based on age like Top 40 Under 40 or by type of business including Best Restaurant or Best Law Firm.

The trick is to find the opportunities that are a good fit for your business and get listed. Sometimes you have to win to get mentioned and other times you just need to get nominated.

Get links from places like:

Chamber of commerce, news publications, and major publications if you’re good enough 🙂

Getting a link from the Chamber of Commerce like the example above is very relevant as it only serves businesses within that city. It’s also a plus for informed local shoppers.

How you can do it

The best way to find these potentially lucrative links is to do a Google Search. You need to start by coming up with a list of potential sources. Since these are generally city or state specific, it’s a good idea to use one of these search strings:

Once you have curated a list of awards you want to try to apply for you can then send your pitch to each of these websites directly. Typically they have nomination forms that you would fill out or a certain procedure. If you can’t find out how, don’t be afraid to ask!

#3 Get eco-friendly links

Is your business green? Does it operate according to low energy standards or are you at least on track to be green? Why not help out the environment and get a link out of it as well? Now while you probably won’t show up onNewsweek‘s America’s Greenest Companies 2014 for doing this, there are a lot of offline benefits to being green as well. I already mentioned saving the environment, but did you realize there are eco-friendly shoppers? Some shoppers do the majority of their business with companies that are eco-friendly and I suspect this will just continue to soar.

Get links from places like:

Mostly business directories and local news organizations who promote green businesses.

How you can do it

With this industry there are some low hanging fruits, but just like all link building, you should be smart about your approach. While it might be tempting to go out and get a link on a directory, I would personally spend time scrutinizing it to make sure it’s a strong website that’s human-edited and controlled. If you don’t find it reputable, nobody else will (including Google). That’s why it’s best to focus on local opportunities such as your local newspaper or community directory.

Make sure to familiarize yourself with the Green Terminology here. Once you have a good idea of what you’re looking for, you can conduct some easy searches such as the ones below to find directories. Again, please be sure to scrutinize them.

Search for directories by using search phrases like:

Eco-friendly business directory

Green business directories

#4 Sponsor a meetup group

While of course we’re talking about links here, I always like to see the other side of a link and the actual benefit it will give you. Did you know you can sponsor meetup groups and get a link as well as get in front of your potential customers?

Meetup.com is a powerhouse website that connects like minded groups of people together through events they call meetups. If you have a good grasp of your target audience and you know where they hang out, you can get in front of them more easily.

For example, let’s say that you’re a bike store. Would it make sense to sponsor a local meetup biking club? Yes!

How you can do it

Sponsoring a meetup group does require the group owner to accept your sponsorship and terms. Your goal however is to get your business name, logo, discount, and link in the ad as shown in the example. If you’re ambitious and a local store you could ask to have your NAP displayed as well for Local SEO purposes.

Step 1: Start by determining what type of groups might appeal to your audience. I have included some tricky examples below:

Attorneys – Maybe sponsoring a cycling- or driving-based meetup with the safety approach

Doctors – Sponsor a healthy living meetup

Airsoft or Paintball Store – Sponsor a singles group by offering an event

Construction – Sponsor a charity group or a new homeowners’ group

That’s enough to get the wheels turning. Write these ideas down and proceed to the next step.

Step 2: Turn to Google to make your search easier! Use the search strings below to only search the meetup.com website with the keywords you’re looking for:

site:meetup.com state+keyword or site:meetup.com city+keyword

Step 3: Click through the results and find a meetup group that seems to fit the bill.

Step 4: Show up to the next scheduled local meetup group. Network. Meet the group owner and see if they’re seeking sponsorship’s.

Step 5: Negotiate and get your site up!

#5 Host a community event

If you want to do event link building check out mylocal event link building post here or Kane Jamison’s event link post here. While those posts go more into how you can really promote an event and build some awesome local links, I want to talk specifically about how you can get listed on your city’s website by hosting a community event. The thing I like most about events is that you get to give back to your community and help people. Not even a link feels as good as that.

The only real requirements for this one is that you host an event where the entire community is invited and get a blessing from the town. In the example below you can see how a church in my town of Parker, Colorado was able to get a link by hosting an Easter Egg Hunt.

So not only are they getting exposure from people in their town (their target audience), they’re getting the link and mentions here too. If the event was hosted at your office or business location, then you can get the added superior benefit of your NAP listed on their website!

If it’s a county-wide event, you can get listed on the county website and if the event is public safety you might be able to get the Fire Department and Police Departments on board as well. Plus this can come with the added benefit of news coverage.

Get links from places like:

Your city’s website and major community news sources

How you can do it

The first thing you need to do is figure out what type of event you want to host. Depending on the size of your town and the size of the event, it can be a big deal. I’m a bit of a event fanatic so for me it comes easy. Don’t be afraid to start small though as long as you’re creating and providing a productive resource for your community.

Some potential ideas include:

Trash Pickup Day – Host a trash pickup day where the meeting place is your business or you sponsor the bags.

Toy Drop off for Needy Kids – Host a toy drive or drop off for kids in need.

Seminar – Host a seminar in your area of expertise that will be the most beneficial to residents. If you like this idea then also try starting a meetup group (see #4 above).

Step 1: Figure out the event type.

Step 2: Get the town on board with the idea and schedule a date at least 60 days out.

Step 4: Make sure it goes up on the town’s website with your company event page linked.

Step 5: Promote the heck out of it using the event promotion guide here.

Pro tip 1: Invite local press to your event to cover it. Be sure to meet and greet them and get to know them. More on this later.

Pro tip 2: Invite the local Boy Scouts or other community organizations as well. If their name is attached to the event, you might get more exposure and more link opportunities.

#6 Sponsor or donate to a local club or organization

Sponsorship links can be a slippery slope, but there’s also a place for them. Over the years I have given back to a number of causes I support and have been an active member in charities and nonprofit organizations. Chances are you or someone you know is a part of one right now.

There are a lot of clubs in almost any community. Have you ever heard of the Rotary Club, Kiwanis, Lions Club, etc. These are commonly found in many communities and they typically have state, district, or chapter websites.

Below is a quick example I pulled from the Los Angeles Rotary Club sponsors webpage:

But don’t stop there. While the major clubs are popular, there are also a lot of other potential sponsorship causes and organizations. This is commonly touched on so I’m not going to go into too much detail, but here are some easy search stings you can use to find some opportunities.

“city inurl:sponsors” (Example: Los Angeles inurl:sponsors)

“city inurl:sponsor” (Example: Los Angeles inurl:sponsor)

“city intitle:sponsors” (Example: Los Angeles intitle:sponsors)

keyword donations(Example: Safety donations)

After you have explored these opportunities simply reach out to the organizers and see what type of commitment they’re looking for.

Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to promote your sponsorship. If you’re giving to a good cause, let the community know!

#7 Student, teacher, and alumni discounts

If you’ve done link building research you may have heard of the university discount link building where you can offer a discount to the students and faculty of a university. That has a place and it might be a good place for local links if you have a university nearby. But did you realize there are other student discount opportunities as well?

Typically when I look for opportunities locally I open my eyes a little wider and look for other opportunities like:

K-12 Schools. These can be goldmines and aren’t really talked about much.

Organization discounts. Organizations have students too. Take the Colorado Symphony for example.

Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to add geo modifiers. Remember that anything in “” will search exactly so plurals should be searched separately.

#8 Create and promote a local resource

So you want to send good local link signals and showcase you’re the expert of a local area? What better way than to create a community resource page on your website? Not only will it attract potential links with the proper marketing, it’s also going to show that you’re the expert in your area.

The good thing about creating a local resource is that you or the local operator running that location probably already has a good idea about the city in general. Even if they’re not the most familiar with the area, some research can solve that.

Get links from places like:

Hotels, travel websites, news organizations

How you can do it

Start by coming up with a list of ideas. Locally-based ideas can vary greatly. Here are a few to helps the mice turn the wheel:

Best of Local Guides – Best restaurants in the city or county, top bars, top microbreweries (I like beer, OK), top city attractions, top things for singles, top things for families, a perfect day trip for families, etc.

Local Calendar Creation – Create a local calendar of popular events by topic. High school football calendars, movie premiere dates, HOA meetings, and more.

Once you have the idea, you can move onto the creation of the asset. Notice my use of the word asset. If I’m going to spend the time to create this piece, I want to make sure it’s a linkable asset. That means that it should be substantial and also look great. If the content is weak, you’re going to get a weak appeal.

Once you have built your guide, the real key is promoting it and getting the exposure you need. Make sure to share it with relevant audiences such as Facebook and Google Plus groups. If there are town groups such as “You know you grew up in CITY, when…” those might be a good place to promote your resource.

Figure out where your community members hang out and post it there. Sometimes even city or town run pages will be willing to post or promote your piece. This is just another reason why you need to create a quality piece of content and not just do the bare minimum.

#9 Get manufacturer and wholesaler links

This is an easy one that is often overlooked by small businesses. If you operate a retail business or sell a product that somebody else manufactures, then you have a link opportunity. Many product manufacturers want to show their customers where to buy their products. This might be a store locator or it could just be an authorized reseller list. Either way you need to take advantage of it. This is an opportunity that even local businesses can take advantage of quickly.

One of the reasons we have extensive client intake forms is to address this issue. A lot of times clients will say that they’re listed without actually knowing. It’s best to find out for yourself by getting a complete list of all manufacturers they represent. If they have a website you can get a link.

Get links from places like:

Larger manufacturing companies

How you can do it

Even small stores might represent products from 100+ different manufacturers. Even if they don’t buy manufacturer direct they can still get a link from the manufacturer just by asking.

Step 1: Create a list of all of the brands the client carries and whether they buy direct or from a wholesaler.

Step 2: Visit each manufacturer and distributor website. Find out if they have a store locator or somewhere where they list where you can buy their products.

Step 3: Reach out to those that do from a company email address including all pertinent information (include NAP!) and the link to your website or store location.

Step 4: For those who don’t list this information, outreach to them and ask them if they are willing to set it up. After all it will only help you both sell more products.

Pro tip: Some websites will only display your Name, Address, Phone Number. But if they don’t link to you don’t be afraid to ask. A lot of times they can make the change and add your link.

#10 Build relationships with local influencers

If you want to earn links that will really set you apart from the rest of the herd, you need to start thinking about building actual relationships with influencers. Finding influencers and getting connected can be hard; you have to be real while doing it. These people can range from your local competition, to politicians, to journalists. Finding and connecting with them requires some work, but it’s worth the payoff.

Get links from places like:

How you can do it

The reality is, while some of this research and networking can be done online, at some point, you’re going to have to get out of your office and interact with real humans!

For our example, let’s look at how we might go about forming a relationship with a member of the local media. First off you will want to find a list of press associations in your area. This might be city based or state based. The easiest way to look for these is just to search for them in Google by typing in your state name + press association or press organization.

Once you have the list of the organization(s) you want to work with, check out their membership fees but more importantly their events and conferences. These are the real goldmines. Many of these organizations have an annual conference or event that you can attend. This is where you can usually expect to meet the people with the most connections. It’s important to speak with them in person, exchange contact information, and express your willingness to contribute. If you have an intriguing idea for a specific writer, for example, someone who always writes about tech news, you may be able to pitch a problem you see in your industry that exposes consumers. Your job is to figure out what interests them and offer to help in any way.

#11 Leverage business relationships

In many cases small businesses may already have complementary businesses that might be willing to give a link to your website. In fact, it might make sense from a referral standpoint too. If you use or refer your business to another type of business this is a great opportunity.

Get links from places like:

Other business websites

How you can do this

Getting these opportunities are as easy as curating the list and doing the outreach. Here are some examples for different business types:

Attorneys can get links from: Process servers, investigators, and other services they refer business to

Mortgage Brokers can link to recommended realtors and vice-versa

Doctors can get links from schools (emergency clinic references), insurance companies, and other doctors.

Another way to go about this is to approach like-minded companies that offer services you don’t and you don’t plan on offering. For example if you’re a greeting card store you might be able to get links from gift stores.

Conclusion

Although good link building takes time, thought, and a good amount of effort, it’s easy enough that anyone can do it. With so many different options and ways you can earn links, this is just a small sample that you can use to start gaining new ones today.

Please feel free to share your favorite link building tips. The more the better!

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This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

For too many online companies the About Us page is the elephant in the room, and often the most awkward thing to write. It’s a shame because analytics often shows the page as one of the most frequented on any website. Imagine a ceremonial elephant adorned in his embellished head plate, raising you above your competitors. This could be your About Us page if you show it the care and attention it deserves.

The good news is your about page doesn’t require several hundred pounds of vegetation on a daily basis, nor is there any real need for expensive antique rhinestones.

The bad news is crafting the perfect about page is easier said than done. Many find it difficult to strike the right balance between selling themselves to their customers and driving them away with a self-focused approach, which helps explain why the pages are so often neglected.

At Absolute, we’re looking to revamp our entire website over the coming months, and in particular we’ll be focusing our attention on our about page. We recognize that our page is currently a little on the dull side and while we are researching the topic, I thought it would be great to share nine great, easily applicable techniques we picked up from some of our favorite About Us pages from around the web.

Start by talking about your audience, not yourself

Human nature dictates that we are, first and foremost, concerned with our own problems. While some of us may give to charity or volunteer in our spare time, when it comes to searching for products or services online, we’re all about ourselves and what a brand can do for us.

Blog Tyrant is a great example of a blog that is focused on its visitors. The first thing you see when you land on their about page is a video titled “About Me and You.” The text that follows is then split into two sections, “About Me” and “About You (The Tyrant Troops).”

If this frank, upfront style doesn’t suit your company there are more subtle ways to become more customer-orientated.

Dedicate your opening sentence(s) to your audience’s challenges and objectives. Starting with the very reason they come to your site in the first place is a good way to demonstrate that you have their needs in mind. In our case, for example, it might be a good idea to acknowledge the difficulties marketing managers have in finding an agency that combines creativity with the essential technical skills, which can sometimes be overlooked.

State the facts: If you’re still finding it hard to strike a happy medium between highlighting your selling points and plain boasting, then simply present your readers with the facts. This could be anything from your client retention rate to the amount of new products you offer each month to the number of awards you’ve collected. No one can argue with raw figures.

Let your customers do the talking

When you are thinking of trying out a new hairdresser, dentist or even a fish and chip shop, you don’t base your decision on what they say about themselves. You turn to those around you. By including a few glowing (and up-to-date) customer testimonials on your about page, you can create a hub of information.

Be sure to include the customer or client’s full name and any relevant details that could add credibility to your testimonials. Better still, include photos of your customers, if possible. It all helps to build trust in your brand.

Include customer-focused awards and accreditations. Perhaps you were voted your area’s favorite provider of security products in 2013, or maybe you are part of some authoritative bodies or organisations within your industry. Exploit the instinctive human need to seek reassurance from our peers.

Include different forms of media

Make your about page a feast for the eyes by considering the use of photos, timelines, videos or infographics. If people are going to seek and find your about page, it makes sense to capture their attention for as long as possible, and this is precisely what Moz does. Their timeline incorporates strong image and design while still providing visitors with the key information they need.

Photos don’t necessarily need to be of each individual team member. Although individual head shots do help prospective customers visualize your company, head shots of management, photos of you in action at a fundraising event or even images from a work night out (preferably ones that aren’t likely to spark legal action), can all add character to your brand.

Videos are a great way of entertaining those with particularly short attention spans and can sum up the feeling of your company in a matter of seconds or minutes. If you don’t have extensive time or resources in this area, Vine videos are a great way to add something different to your about page.

Tell your story

Even if your brand doesn’t have an interesting story, you can still tell a story. Focus on the things that make you human.

That’s precisely what a client of ours, ITS, has done with theirAbout Us page. Unfortunately it’s not something we can take credit for personally, but it still embodies everything a great story should have. It starts at the beginning, documenting their modest founding, in 1981 as a 150 square foot shop, all the way to modern day, with plenty of photos along the way. It’s great to see the quality of the photos changing through time, almost like a family scrapbook. Customer ratings and social icons make this page even stronger.

Don’t be afraid of where you have come from. If, eight years ago, your headquarters happened to be your CEO’s conservatory, celebrate it. The more that people can identify with you the more trust they’ll place in your brand. We have become so desensitized to marketing that a company needs a personal touch to set it apart.

You don’t have to tell people everything. If you have been established for 80 years, people don’t want to read a year-by-year account of everything that has happened in that time. Therefore, filter information accordingly, mentioning those key elements of human interest, but keep tales of new windows or a change of paper suppliers to yourself.

Include your address and contact details

Many people are still hesitant when it comes to parting with their money over the Internet and are thus keen to know you aren’t simply looking to fleece them to make a bit of extra cash.

If you don’t want to disclose your full address, at least state your city or town. Potential customers are not so likely to get in touch if you’re less than forthcoming about your location. After all, what else might you be holding back?

Make certain your contact details are up to date. It sounds obvious, but having an out-of-date telephone number or email address could not only lose you a sale but might also send alarm bells ringing.

Your contact details should also include social handles and skype details if applicable.

Cut out the jargon

Writing in acronym-infested jargon might make you feel clever at the time, but it’s boring and it’s cold. People won’t remember you. What theyreally want when they land on your about page is to learn, in simple unambiguous terms, precisely what you do.

Write conversationally. There is no best way to write. The style you adopt will depend on your company, but make an effort to write in a way that makes your content, and your site, feel accessible and friendly. The Adventurists site offers a great example of this. Their about page serve its intended purpose and is quite enjoyable to read. More to the point when they talk about “mobile phones tagged with twattery about which restaurant serves the best mocha-latte-frappeshite”, you find yourself agreeing with them, even if their greater aim of getting youto cross the sub-continent in a three wheeled lawnmower powered tin isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

Don’t name your about page some obscure name like, Our Ethos, or The Journey. People are looking for an About Us page, so give them one. Come up with a name that is too vague and people may miss you completely.

Ask for other peoples’ opinions

Don’t be afraid to ask employees, friends, peers, even clients, what makes you stand out as a business. When you have worked somewhere for a long time, it is tough to see your brand the way customers might see it. An objective opinion can help.

When you have decided on what makes you stand out, be sure to make this a focus.

If your peer search becomes more like soul-searching because you find there is actually nothing different about your company, despair not. Don’t try and force something that isn’t there. Instead, turn it around and focus on what makes your audience unique.

Make sure it reflects your company

In our quest for the perfect about page, we came across some really extravagant examples. Some had really impressive videos, special features or high tech designs. All of those examples were extremely applaudable, but will only really work if this fits in with the rest of your website, your industry and your company as a whole. It’s easy to lose sight of who you are in your mission to create the best page possible.

Even if your website isn’t overly visual, you can still include photos, just make sure they follow the same format as the rest of your website. If your site focuses on boxy shapes and bold colors, then keep this theme running throughout your images. Just as with your marketing, the key is to be succinct. Maintaining a consistent look and feel automatically gives your brand more authority.

The same goes applies for tone. Remember, in today’s multi-platform society, your website may not be someone’s first interaction with you, with visitors often reading an article or coming across a tweet beforehand. In that sense, an about page is almost like a meeting point, an amalgamation of everything that makes your brand who you are.

Test it!

There is no magic formula for about pages. If there were, you probably wouldn’t be 2,000 words into this blog. A good way to treat the process of creating such a page, then, is as a work in progress.

Don’t be afraid to make amendments. Spend a fair amount of time checking your analytics for traffic volumes, bounce rate and visit duration on the page. Tweak the odd sentence, add images, chop them out, introduce a video, etc, based on what the data tells you.

Make sure the page is accessible across all devices. It makes no sense to spend all this time creating an amazing page that is only visible to a small percentage of your audience, which is roughly what will happen if you ignore mobile and tablet users. Whether you have responsive design or a dedicated mobile site, test the performance of the page continually.

Of all the pages we looked at, our favorite is the one below, from Macmillan. TheirAbout Us section is actually split into different pages, but the initial page makes use of video, explains briefly and simply what they do, includes contact details, testimonials and, most important, thanks people for their continued support.

Those readers who then want to learn more, as undoubtedly many will, can do so via links directing them to images of the team, as well as facts, figures and corporate partnership details. It might not be as flashy or as up to date as some, but it’s what best represents them and that’s the point.

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Roger Dooley, neuromarketing expert, reminds us in his book Brainfluence that in 80% of cases we make a decision before being rationally aware of it.

Although Dooley explains this effect in terms of how our brain works, in my opinion, distinctly separating neuroscience and the theory of archetypes would be incorrect. On the contrary, I believe that these two aspects of the study of the human mind are complementary.

According toJung, archetypes are “[…] forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the Earth as constituents of myths and—at the same time—as individual products of unconscious”. He then, added something that interests us greatly: “The [forms and images] are imprinted and hardwired into out psyches”.

Being able to design a brand personality around an archetype that connects unconsciously with our audience is a big first step for: brand loyalty, community creation, engagement, conversions.

Archetypes can be also used for differentiating our brand and its messaging from others in our same market niche and to give that brand a unique voice.

If we put users at the center of our marketing strategy, thenwe cannot limit ourselves in knowing how they search, how they talk on social media, what they like to share or what their demographics are.

No,we should also understand the deep psychological reasons why they desire something they search for, talk the way they talk, share what they share, and their psychological relation with the environment and society they live in.

Knowing that, we can use archetypes to create a deep emotional connection with our audience and earn their strong positive attitude toward us thanks to the empathy that is created between them and us.

Narrative modes, then, help us in shaping in a structured way a brand storytelling able to guide and engage the users, and not simply selling or creating content narrative doomed to fail.

The 12 archetypes

The chart above presents the 12 Jungian archetypes (i.e: Hero), to what principal human desire (i.e.: leave a mark on the world) they correspond and what is the main behavior each one uses for achieving that desire (i.e.: mastery).

Remember: if the audience instinctively recognizes the archetypal figure of the brand and its symbolism and instinctively connect with it, then your audience is more ready to like and trust what your brand proposes.

On the other hand, it is also a good exercise to experiment with archetypes that we would not think are our brand’s one, expanding the practice of A/B tests to make sure we’re working with the correct archetype.

The Creator

In my last post I used Lego as example of a brand that is winning Internet marketing thanks to its holistic and synergistic use of offline and online marketing channels.

I explained also how part of its success is due to the fact Lego was able to shape its messages and brand personality around the Creator archetype (sometimes called the “Builder”) which is embodied by their tagline, “let’s build”.

Creators tend to be nonconformist and to enjoy self expression.A Creator brand, then, will empower and prize its audience as much as it is able to express itself using its products.

The Ruler

The Ruler is the leader, the one setting the rules others will follow, even competitors. Usually it’s paired with anidea of exclusiveness and status growth.

A brand that presents itself as a Ruler is suggesting to their audience that they can be rulers too.

A classic example of Ruler brand is Mercedes:

The Caregiver

Altruism, compassion, generosity.Caregiver brands present themselves as someone to trust, because they care and empathize with their audience.

The Caregiver is one of the most positive archetypes, and it is obviously used by nonprofit organizations or governmental institutions like UNICEF, but brands like Johnson & Johnson have also shaped their personality and messages around this figure.

The Innocent

The Innocent finds positive sides in everyone and everything.

It sees beauty even in things that others will not even consider, and feels in peace with its inner beauty.

Dove, obviously, is a good representation of the Innocent archetype.

The Sage

The Sages wants to know and understand things.

The Sage is deeply humanist and believe in the power of humankind to shape a better world through knowledge.

However, the Sage also has a shadowed side: intolerance to ideas others than their own.

Google, in both cases, is a good example a Sage brand.

The Explorer

The Explorer is adventurous, brave, and loves challenges. He tends to be an individualist too, and loves to challenge himself so as to find his real self.

Explorer brands prompt their audience to challenge themselves and to discover the Explorer within.

Red Bull is a classic example of these kinds of brands, but REI and Patagonia are even better representations.

The Hero

In many aspects, the Hero archetype is similar to the Explorer and Outlaw ones, with the difference that the Hero many times never wanted to be the hero, but injustice and external events obliged him to find the courage, braveness, and the honor to become one.

Nike, and also its competitor Adidas, shapes its brand voice around this archetypal figure.

The Magician

The Magician is clever, intelligent, and sometimes his ability can be considered supernatural.

The Magician is able to make the impossible possible. Because of that some of the best known technology brands use this archetype as their own to showcase their innovation and how they use their advanced knowledge creatively.

Apple—even if you are not an Apple fan—created a powerful brand by shaping it around this archetype.

The Outlaw

The Outlaw is the rebel, the one who breaks the rules in order to free his true self.

The Outlaw goes against the canon and is very aware of the constrictions society creates.

A great example of a brand that very well represents the Outlaw archetype is Betabrand.

The Everyman

It is perfectly fine to be “normal,” and happiness can come from simply sharing things with people we love.

Brands targeting the Everyman audience (and painting themselves as such) craft their messages about the beauty of simple things and daily real life.

Ikea is probably the brand that’s achieved mastery in the use of this archetype over the past few years.

The Jester

Fun, irreverent, energetic, impulsive and against the established rules at the same time, the Jester is also the only one who is able to tell the truth with a joke.

Jesters can be revolutionary too, and their motto could be “a laugh will bury you all.”

A brand that presents itself as the Jester is a brand that wants to make our lives easier and more bearable, providing us joy.

The Lover

Sensuality is the main characteristic of the Lover archetype, as well as strong physicality, passion, and a need for deep and strong sensations.

But the Lover can be also the idealist, the romantic longing for the perfect love.

Archetypes and brand storytelling

Therefore, once we have decided what archetype figure best responds both to our audience and our values as a brand,we must translate the psychology we created for our brand into
brand storytelling. That storytelling must then be attuned to the psychology of our audience based on our psychographic analysis of them.

Good (brand) storytelling is very hard to achieve, and most of the time we see brands that miserably fail when trying to tell branded stories.

Introducing the Theory of Literary (or Narrative) Modes

In order to help my clients find the correct narrative, I rely on something that usually is not considered by marketers: theTheory of Literary Modes.

The theory is based on a objective and “scientific” analysis of data (the literary corpus produced by humans);

It refuses “personal taste” as a metric, which in web marketing would be the same as creating a campaign with tactics you like but you don’t really know if your public is interested in. Even worse, it would be like saying “create great content” without defining what that means.

Moreover, theTheory of Literary Modes is deeply structured and strongly relies on semiotics, which is going to be the natural evolution of how search engines like Google will comprehend the content published in the Internet. Semantic thinking is just the first step as well explained Isla McKetta here on Moz few months ago.

Finally, Northrop Fryedconsiders also archetypes this theory because of the psychological and semiotic value of the symbolism attached to the archetypal figure.

Therefore, my election to use the Theory of Literary Modes responds

To the need to translate ideal brand storytelling into something real that can instinctively connect with the brand’s audience;

To make the content based on that storytelling process understandable also by search engines.

The Theory of Literary Modes in marketing

To understand how this works in marketing, we need to dig a little deeper into the theory.

A literary work can be classified in two different but complementary ways:

1) Considering only therelation between the nature of the main character (the Hero) and the ambient (or environment) where he acts.

2) Considering alsoif the Hero is refused or accepted by society (Tragedy and Comedy).

In thefirst case, as represented in the schema above, if the Hero:

Is higher by nature than the readers and acts in a completely different ambient than theirs, we have a Romance;

Is higher by nature than the readers, but acts in their same ambient, we have an Epic;

Is someone like the reader and acts in the reader’s own ambient, we are in field of Realism;

Is someone lower by nature than the readers and acts in a different or identical ambient, we are in the realm of Irony, which is meant as “distance.”

A fifth situation exists too, theMyth, when the nature of the Hero is different than ours and acts in an ambient different than ours. The Hero, in this case, is the God.

If we consider also if society refuses or accepts the hero, we can discover the different versions of Tragedy and Comedy.

I will not enter in the details of Tragedy, becausewe will not use its modes for brand storytelling (this is only common in specific cases of political marketing or propaganda, classic examples are the mythology of Nazism or Communism).

On the contrary,the most common modes used in brand storytelling are related to Comedy, where the Hero, who usually is the target audience, is eventually accepted by society (the archetypal world designed by the brand).

InComedy we have several sub modes of storytelling:

“The God Accepted.” The Hero is a god or god-like kind of person who must pass through trials in order to be accepted by the society;

The Idyll, where the Hero uses his skills to explore (or conquer) an ideal world and/or become part of an ideal society. Far West and its heir, Space Opera (think of Interstellar) are classic examples.

Comedy sees the hero trying to impose his own view of the world, fighting for it and finally being awarded with acceptance of his worldview. A good example of this is every well ending biopic of an entrepreneur, and Comedy is the exact contrary of melodrama.

On a lower level we can find the Picaresque Comedy, where the hero is by nature inferior to the society, but – thanks to his cleverness – is able to elevate himself to society’s level. Some technology business companies use this narrative mode for telling their users that they can “conquer” their market niche despite not having the same economic possibilities as the big brands (this conquering usually involves the brand’s tools).

Finally we have the Irony Mode of Comedy which is quite complex to define.

It can represent stories where the hero is actually an antihero, who finally fails in his integration into the society.

It can also be about inflicting pain on helpless victims, as in mystery novels.

It can also be Parody.

Some examples

The Magician, gamification, and the Idyllic mode

Consider this brand plot:

The user (the Hero) can become part of a community of users only if he or she passes through a series of tasks, which will award prizes and more capabilities. If the user is able to pass through all the tasks, he will not only be accepted but also may have the opportunity to be among the leaders of the community itself.

And nowconsider sites, which are strongly centered on communities like GitHub and Code Academy. Consider also SAAS companies that present the freemium model like Moz or mobile games like Boom Beach, where you can unlock new weapons only if you pass a given trial (or you buy them).

The Magician is usually the archetype of reference for these kinds of brands. The Hero (the user) will be able to dominate a complex art thanks to the help of a Master (the brand), which will offer him instruments (i.e.: tools/courses/weapons).

Trials are not necessarily tests. A trial can be doing something that will be awarded, for instance, with points (like commenting on a Moz blog post), and the more the points the more the recognition, with all the advantages that it may offer.

Gamification, then, assumes an even stronger meaning and narrative function when tied to an archetype and literary mode.

Ikea, the Everyman, and the Comedic mode

Anotherexample is Ikea, which we cited before when talking of the Everyman archetype.

In this case, the Hero is someone like me or you who is not an interior designer or decorator or, maybe, who does not have the money for hiring those professionals or buying very expensive furniture and decoration.

But, faithful to its mission statements (“design for all”, “design your own life”…), Ikea is there to help Everyman kind of people like me and you in every way as we decorate our own houses.

On the practical side, this narrative is delivered in all the possible channels used by Ikea: web site, mobile app, social media (look at itsTwitter profile) and YouTube channel.

Betabrand, the Outlaw, and Picaresque Comedy

A third and last example can beBetabrand.

In this case both the brand and the audience is portrayed using theOutlaw archetype, and the brand narrative tend to use the Picaresque mode.

The Heroes is the Betabrand community who does not care what the mainstream concept of fashion is and designs and crowdfounds “its fashion.”

How to use archetypes and narrative modes in your brand storytelling

The first thing you must understand is what archetype best responds to your company tenets and mission.

Usually this is not something an SEO can decide by him- or herself, but it is something that founders, CEOs, and directors of a company can inform.

Oftentimes a small to medium business company can achieve this with a long talk among those company figures and where they are asked to directly define the idealistic “why?” of their company.

In case of bigger companies, defining an archetype can seem almost impossible to do, but the same history of the company and hidden treasure pages like “About Us” can offer clear inspiration.

Look at REI:

Clearly the archetype figure that bests fits REI is the Explorer.

Then, using the information we retrieve when creating thepsychographic of our audience and buyer personas, matching with the characteristics each archetype has, and comparing it with the same brand core values, we can start to understand the archetype and narrative mode. If we look at REI’s audience, then we will see how it also has a certain affinity with the Everyman archetypal figure (and that also explains why REI also dedicates great attention to family as audience).

Once we have defined the best archetype commonly shared by our company and our audience, we must translate this figure and its symbolism into brand storytelling, which in web site includes design, especially the following:

Color pattern, because colors have a direct relation with psychological reaction (see this article, especially all the sources it links to)

Images, considering that in user-centric marketing the ideal is always to represent our targeted audience (or a credible approximation) as their main characters. I am talking of the so called “hero-shots”, about which Angie Shoetmuller brilliantly discussed in the deck I embed here below:

If you want to dig deeper in discovering the meaning and value of symbols worldwide, I suggest you become member ofAras.org or to buy the Book of Symbols curated by Aras.

Define the best narrative mode to use. REI, again, does this well, using the Idyllic mode where the Hero explores and become part of an ideal society (the REI community, which literally means becoming a member of REI).

Using GA insights in combination with the data and demographic information offered by social networks’ ad platforms in order to create not only the interest graph of our audience but also to understand the psychology behind those interests

Doing A/B tests so to see whether symbols, images, and copywriting based on the targeted archetypes work better and if we have the correct archetype.

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Finding your next SEO hire is hard, but it’s only half the battle. Growing a team isn’t just about hiring—it’s about making your whole team, newbies and experts alike, better marketers.

It’s almost impossible to build a one-size-fits-all training program for digital marketers, since the tasks involved will depend a lot on the role. Even “SEO” can mean a lot of different things. Your role might be highly technical, highly creative, or a mix of both. Tactics like local SEO or conversion rate optimization might be a huge part of an SEO’s job or might be handled by another person entirely. Sometimes an SEO role includes elements like social media or paid search. The skills you teach your trainees will depend on what you need them to do, and more specifically, what you need them to do right now.

Whatever the specifics of the marketing role,you need to make sure you’re providing a growth plan for your digital marketers (this goes for your more experienced team members, as well as your newbies). A professional growth plan helps you and your team members:

Track whether or not they’re making progress in their roles. Taking on a new skill set can be daunting. Having a growth plan can alleviate some of the stress less-experienced employees may feel when learning a new skill, and makes sure more experienced employees aren’t stagnating.

Spot problem areas. Everyone’s talents are different, but you don’t want someone to miss out on growth opportunities because they’re such a superstar in one area and are neglecting everything else.

Have conversations around promotions and raises. Consistently tracking people’s development across a variety of skill sets allows you to compare where someone is now to where they were when you hired them; it also gives you a framework to discuss what additional steps might be needed before a promotion or raise is in order, and help them develop a plan to get there.

Advance their careers. One of your duties as their manager is to make sure you’re giving them what they need to continue on their career path. A professional development plan should be managed with career goals in mind.

Increase employee retention. Smart people like to learn and grow, and if you’re not providing them ways to do so, they’re not going to stick around.

We have technical/on-page SEOs, content marketers, local SEOs and marketing copywriters all working together on the same team at BigWing. We wanted to create a framework for professional development that we could apply to the whole team, so we identified a set of areas that any digital marketer should be growing in, regardless of their focus. This growth plan is part of everyone’s mid-year and year-end reviews.

Here’s what it looks like:

Growth areas for digital marketers

Tactical -> strategic

At the beginner level, team members are still learning the basic concepts and tasks associated with their role, and how those translate to the client metrics they’re being measured on. It takes time to encounter and fix enough different kinds of things to know “in x situation, look at a, b and c and then try y or z.”

As someone grows in their role, they will learn more advanced tactics. They should also be more and more able to use critical thinking to figure out how to solve problems and tackle longer-term client goals and projects.At the senior level, an SEO should be building long-term strategies and be comfortable with unusual campaigns and one-off projects.

Small clients -> big clients

There are plenty of small brochure websites in the world, and these sites are a great testing ground for the fundamentals of SEO: they may still have weird jacked-up problems (so many websites do), but they are a manageable size and don’t usually have the potential for esoteric technical issues that large, complex sites do. Once someone has a handle on SEO, you can start assigning bigger and badder sites and projects (with plenty of mentoring from more experienced team members—more on that later).

We thought about making this one “Easy clients -> difficult clients,” because there’s another dimension to this line of progress: increasingly complex client relationships. Clients with very large or complicated websites (or clients with more than one website) are likely to have higher budgets, bigger internal staff, and more stakeholders. As the number of people involved increases, so does the potential for friction, so a senior-level SEO should be able to handle those complex relationships with aplomb.

Learning -> teaching

At the beginner level, people are learning digital marketing in general and learning about our specific internal processes. As they gain experience, they become a resource for team members still in the “learning” phase, and at the senior level they should be a go-to for tough questions and expert opinions.

Even a beginner digital marketer may have other things to teach the team; skills learned from previous careers, hobbies or side gigs can be valuable additions. For example, we had a brand-new team member with a lot of experience in photography, a valuable skill for content marketers; she was able to start teaching her teammates more about taking good photos while still learning other content marketing fundamentals herself.

I love this stock picture because the chalkboard just says “learning.” Photo viaPixabay.

Since managers can’t be everywhere at once, more experienced employees must take an active role in teaching.It’s not enough that they be experts (which is why this scale doesn’t go from “Learning” to “Mastering”); they have to be able to impart that expertise to others. Teaching is more than just being available when people have questions, too: senior team members are expected to be proactive about taking the time to show junior team members the ropes.

Prescribed -> creative

The ability to move from executing a set series of tasks to creating creative, heavily client-focused digital marketing campaigns is, in my opinion,one of the best predictors of long-term SEO success. When someone is just starting out in SEO, it’s appropriate to have a fairly standard set of tasks they’re carrying out. For a lot of those small sites that SEO trainees start on, that set of SEO fundamentals goes a long way. The challenge comes when the basics aren’t enough.

Creative SEO comes from being able to look at a client’s business, not just their website, and tailor a strategy to their specific needs. Creative SEOs are looking for unique solutions to the unique problems that arise from that particular client’s combination of business model, target market, history and revenue goals. Creativity can also be put to work internally, in the form of suggested process improvements and new revenue-driving projects.

General -> T-shaped

The concept of the T-shaped marketer has been around for a few years (if you’re not familiar with the idea, you can read up on it onRand’s blog or the Distilled blog). Basically, it means that in addition to deep knowledge whatever area(s) of inbound marketing we specialize in, digital marketers should also work to develop basic knowledge of a broad set of marketing disciplines, in order to understand more about the craft of marketing as a whole.

A digital marketer who’s just starting out will naturally be focusing more on the broad part of their T, getting their head around the basic concepts and techniques that make up the digital marketing skill set. Eventually most people naturally find a few specialty areas that they’re really passionate about. Encouraging employees to build deep expertise ultimately results in a whole team full of subject matter experts in a whole team’s worth of subjects.

Beginner -> expert

This one is pretty self-explanatory. The important thing to note is that expertise isn’t something that just happens to you after you do something a lot (although that’s definitely part of it).Honing expertise means actively pursuing new learning opportunities and testing new ideas and tactics, and we look for the pursuit of expertise as part of evaluating someone’s professional growth.

Observing -> leading

Anyone who is working in inbound marketing should be consistently observing the industry—they should be following search engine news, reading blog posts from industry experts, and attending events and webinars to learn more about their craft. It’s a must-do at all levels, and even someone who’s still learning the ropes can be keeping an eye on industry buzz and sharing items of interest with their co-workers.

Not everyone is crazy about the phrase “thought leadership.” When you’re a digital marketing agency, though,your people are your product—their depth of knowledge and quality of work is a big part of what you’re selling. As your team gains experience and confidence, it’s appropriate to expect them to start participating more in the digital marketing space, both online and in person. This participation could look like:

Pitching and speaking at marketing conferences

Contributing to blogs, whether on your site or in other marketing communities

Organizing local tech meetups

Regularly participating in online events like #seochat

…or a variety of other activities, depending on the individual’s talents and interests. Not only does this kind of thought-leadership activity promote your agency brand, it also helps your employees build their personal brands—and don’t forget, a professional development plan needs to be as much about helping your people grow in their careers as it is about growing the skill sets you need.

Low output -> high output

I love the idea of meticulous, hand-crafted SEO, but let’s be real: life at an agency means getting stuff done. When people are learning to do stuff, it takes them longer to do (which is BY FAR MY LEAST FAVORITE PART OF LEARNING TO DO THINGS, I HATE IT SO MUCH), so expectations of the number of clients/volume of work they can handle should scale appropriately. It’s okay for people to work at their own pace and in their own way, but at some point you need to be able to rely on your team to turn things around quickly, handle urgent requests, and consistently hit deadlines, or you’re going to lose customers.

You may notice that some of these growth areas overlap, and that’s okay—the idea is to create a nuanced approach that captures all the different ways a digital marketer can move toward excellence.

Like with all other aspects of a performance review, it’s important to be as specific as possible when discussing a professional growth plan. If there’s an area a member of your team needs to make more progress in, don’t just say e.g. “You need to be more strategic.” Come up with specific projects and milestones for your marketer to hit so you’re both clear on when they’re growing and what they need to do to get to the next level.

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At this very moment a spammy comment is being written on the Moz Blog, a tweet is being sent to @Moz, and someone is signing up for the next Mozinar. You’ll probably never see any of these happen, and may not realize that just like Newton’s third law states, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” As each one of these actions occurs, a Moz Community Manager is jumping into a reaction: The spammer is banned, the tweet is answered, and the Mozinar is being prepared.

Charlene, Megan, and Erica showing how much fun Community Managers have 🙂

Today isCommunity Manager Appreciation Day, or #CMAD as it’s come to be known. It’s a day to thank the amazing community managers out there who keep all things moving no matter what the day or time. At Moz, we’re lucky to have an exceptional team of folks that manages everything from social media posts to handling spammers. It’s not always a pretty job, but it’s one they take to heart, and have come to live and breathe the role.

Did you know the @Moz Twitter account is handled by 7 different people?

I dare you to try to figure out who’s tweeting when.

It’s my great honor to introduce and thank each of our community managers, as well as several folks who contribute greatly to the team. They make sure our site isn’t overrun with spam, your questions get answered in Q&A, your tweets see replies, and that you have help writing a great post for YouMoz.

Before I dive in, I’d like to give a shout out to all of ourAssociates, especially Gianluca and Miriam, who help the Community team in a myriad of ways every single day. In order to be fair, I’ll introduce each person in terms of how long they’ve been working on community-related tasks here at Moz.

Keri Morgret – Community Manager

Keri started out as an Associate in early 2011, where she initially focused on YouMoz. She had been quite active in the greater SEO community, and her knowledge and experience was top-notch. Top that with a need for perfect grammar (she once refused to read a self-published book because of bad grammar), and she took YouMoz to great heights.

Over time, she took over Q&A, and eventually came to manage just about everything happening on the site each day. Keri moved to Seattle, and became a full-time Mozzer in May 2012. Here’s a high-level peek at all the areas Keri currently handles:

Managing YouMoz

Managing Q&A

User moderation

Coordination with Help Team

As someone we often call our “super sleuth,” Keri likes to know everything that’s happening on the site at all times. My appreciation for her goes well beyond her keeping tabs on the community for us. She cares for Moz and our entire community to her core. She lives and breathes TAGFEE, and holds all of us at Moz to the highest standards, constantly reminding us to focus on our community.

This year in particular was a special one for Keri, as she welcomed her daughter Eloise to the world. I’ll throw in a big thank you to Eloise as well, who has brought so much love and happiness to Keri and her husband. 🙂

2014 Stat: The team banned 1,235 accounts for comment spam.

Erica McGillivray – Sr. Community Manager

Between the time Erica accepted the role of “Community Attache” in October 2011, and the time she actually started just a few weeks later, her job had completely changed. Lucky for us, her background is diverse: Not only has she been an SEO in a previous life, but she’s managed email campaigns, writes killer copy, and was once the President of GeekGirlCon. She accepted the changed role, and focused on marketing communications for a while. However, it didn’t take too long for her to find her true calling back on the community team!

Erica quickly proved her prowess at managing speakers and events, and took over our bi-weekly webinars (a.k.a. Mozinars), as well as speaker coordination for our annual conference, MozCon. Plus, with her knowledge of SEO and social, she took over the management of our social media channels, and helped Keri with on-site work as needed.

Today, as our Senior Community Manager, she’s in charge of the following areas:

Event project management (ensuring pages are created for events, videos are ready to sell, etc.)

Handling of escalated social or on-site issues

Community strategy

Team management backup

This year, I’m extremely thankful for Erica stepping in and helping with bigger strategy items, and being my backup! Ok, that really just means she ends up going to a lot more meetings, but still, it’s been great. 🙂

2014 Stat: 8,945 people watched our webinars live.

Christy Correll – Q&A Associate

Christy and I worked together many years ago in Denver (in what feels like a completely different life). When we realized that Q&A was getting more active in early 2012, and we needed an additional set of eyes in there, I knew just who to turn to. Christy was running her own online marketingagency, so I knew she had the background and ability, and I was pleased to find out she had the time as well!

What began as a possible 10 hours/week job has grown into at least a half-time gig. We count on Christy’s insights and smarts in Q&A every single day. She and Keri use a spreadsheet with all of our staff and Associates expertise to know who best to assign things to. She’s also been helping out more and more with the editing of YouMoz blog posts.

Christy, thank you for your continued excellence in making Q&A an amazing place to give and get answers to all kind of online marketing questions.

2014 Stat: 8,165 questions were asked in Q&A with 31,218 replies.

Megan Singley – Social Community Manager

Megan had been working on the Help team for almost two years, when we stole her over to the community team in January of 2013 (yes, that means she just hit her 4-year mark!). She was more knowledgeable about our tools and how to help our customers than any of the rest of us were. Her love has always been in social, and she initially worked with Erica on managing our social accounts. It didn’t take long, though, for her to take over social management, and she is currently the go-to person for all things social media. At this very moment we have some fascinating social tests happening on Twitter thanks to her work. (Now, if only I could get her to write a blog post about the tests!)

She’s also the one who can always put a smile on someone’s face if they’re having a grumpy day. (She once sent a guy cookies because he tweeted @Moz saying the latest Whiteboard Friday had made him hungry for cookies.) And with this kind of work, you run into some grumpy folks now and then (usually me). 😉

Megan is focused on these areas:

Daily social management (everyone helps with this, but she does the scheduling and is the resource for escalation)

Social testing

Product feedback liaison

Weekly metrics

Community Chronicle (a monthly email about community metrics)

Community College (internal training on all things community)

Right? That’s a lot! Megan has stepped out of her comfort zone, and helped us to create some great internal processes, and keeps us all on track on social (a place where I usually get in trouble!). I’m grateful to her for taking on this new role and striving to make our social marketing the absolute best in the industry.

2014 Stat: The team sent a whopping 9.6k tweets from the @Moz account.

Melissa Fach – Social Associate

Melissa began as an Associate in 2013, to help us manage the growing YouMoz queue. As a well-known SEO and previous editor at Search Engine Journal, YouMoz made perfect sense for her. During MozCon that year, we asked her to help us manage social while we were busy with the conference, and we quickly realized that social was her true calling for Moz.

With our growing international community, we had been looking for someone to manage all our social channels during our off-hours. Melissa to the rescue! Not only did she already know the industry, and had been a part of the Moz community for years, but lucky for us she lives in Florida, three hours ahead of the Mozplex.

I’m not exactly sure what we’d do without Melissa these days. Her role of managing all the social things during the wee hours of the morning is essential to Moz. She alerts us if there are multiple tweets about a tool not working, or if a certain post is doing exceptionally well (or exceptionally poorly, for that matter). She’s the eyes and ears of Moz while those of us here in Seattle are still fast asleep. (Unless we’re talking about Keri being up with her newborn at 3 a.m.)

Melissa has the difficult job of working from her home in Florida, yet staying on top of everything that’s happening throughout the day at Moz. She does this well, so that each morning she knows how to respond to questions on Twitter, and knows when there’s something going on. A huge thank you to her for always making us look so darn good!

2014 Stat: We saw a 43% YOY loss in Facebook traffic.

Trevor Klein – Content Strategist

Trevor is the lucky guy who gets to edit posts for the Moz Blog. Yep, he edited this one too, and when he gets to this part he’s going to feel really weird for a few seconds. 🙂 [Editor’s note: It’s true.] Trevor is a part of the Content Team here at Moz, but because content and community are so closely tied, his job often crosses roles.

Trevor started managing the blog in May 2013. He’s upped the ante on our blog content, and quickly realized that content doesn’t end upon publishing a post. We get tons of comments and thumbs on posts, and he helps Keri and the rest of the team to moderate all the things. He’ll email a member who’s posted too many spammy links in their otherwise well written comments, or reply to a comment reminding a member to stay TAGFEE in their responses.

Personally, I’m grateful to have someone on the team who cares so deeply about Moz and the community that he’s willing to stand up for his beliefs, and for the community. (Even if he is standing up to or disagreeing with me. ;)) [Editor’s sarcastic note: Thatnever happens. Ever.]

Charlene Inoncillo – Community Brand Manager

Although Charlene started back in September 2011, and had been handling all our event details for a while, it wasn’t until 2014 that she became an official part of the Community team. She initially started as the Marketing Admin, and swiftly worked herself into a full-time events manager. Over time this role has changed as she’s increased her skillset, and has continued to break her own goals.

Charlene works closely with Erica on all of our events, plus she’s in charge of any sponsorships or speaking engagements we have throughout the year. Here’s the high-level list of Charlene’s roles:

With her addition, we’ve completely upped our game when it comes to branding. Charlene works with our design team to create beautiful swag, have a perfect brand experience at MozCon, and essentially make us look good, consistently. It also helps that she’s the most organized person I know, and always considers even the tiniest of details. (Which is really great for someone like me who dislikes dealing with details.)

What am I most thankful of Charlene for this year? It’s the little things, actually. She ensured that every blog post, webinar, event, product launch, etc. has branded images that we share on social, and in blog posts. These things make a huge impact!

Danie Launders – Marketing Specialist

While Danie isn’t officially on the Community team, we pretend as if she is. We started stealing her time early in 2014, and just keep pulling her in farther (shh, don’t tell Annette, our CMO). Danie’s ability to jump into any project and willingness to learn all the things have had a great impact on the community team this past year. She’s an absolute natural with the Moz “voice” and manages our social channels several times per week (in 4-hour shifts).

She’s crazy-organized, so it makes sense that she helps Charlene with all the events, sponsorship, and swag tasks. This year, I’m thankful for every single thing Danie does. Whether making sure our Associates get paid, sending swag to an active member, or just replying to a Facebook message, she does it with grace.

2014 Stat: 9k+ tweets were sent using the #MozCon hashtag.

Ronell Smith – YouMoz Associate

Ronell may be our newest member of the team, but his impact has been swift and grand. While Keri was on maternity leave, we needed someone to help manage YouMoz posts. It had to be someone who knows the online marketing industry well, plus has great editing skills, AND is a great writer. When Keri went on leave a bit sooner than expected, we had to throw Ronell into the YouMoz fire without a ton of training.

If you’ve submitted a YouMoz post recently, and have worked with Ronell, you know what I mean when I say he’s kicked royal butt for us. He cares deeply about ensuring that posts are of the highest quality, and he works with authors (I’ve seen email threads between him and an author that were 65+ emails deep!) to help improve their writing. This is why even after Keri returned from leave, we asked him to continue making YouMoz awesome.

My thank-you to Ronell is for helping us to not only improve our process, but to up our YouMoz game. Heck, the entire community thanks you.

2014 Stat: Only 3.7% of all YouMoz posts submitted were published.

Now it’s your turn.

Impressive group of folks, right? Please help me in thanking them for all their amazing work every day for Moz. Also, I bet after reading about them you may even have a few questions of your own. Well, lucky you! Each one of them is on stand-by today to answer any questions you have about their roles at Moz or how we manage all things community.

Go ahead… ask us anything! (about our jobs)

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One aspect of the Moz Community that doesn’t get mentioned enough is the individual community members who were here in the early days of SEOmoz. The folks who stuck around when our tools were brand new, when Rand was “just another SEO guy,” and when our community was really just a bunch of folks talking about SEO.

One of those early members was Dana Lookadoo. She joined Moz in April 2007, and has been a supporter, trainer, and mentor to many others ever since. Whether it’s the blog posts she’s written, the thoughtful comments she’s left, or the presentations she’s given at MozCon and in webinars, she’s provided for this community like few others have.

Last year, Dana took ahorrible fall when she was on a bike ride (she’s an avid cyclist), and broke her neck and back. She’s had many ups and downs since the accident, and hasn’t been able to work full-time. Dana now suffers intense burning from neuropathy and muscle spacicity that has spread from head to toe, and she has burning and spasms covering approximately 75% of her body. Her mobility and function is greatly limited and she suffers a lot of pain each day.

She splits her time between the wheelchair, the bed, and some in the walker. Unfortunately, over the last few days she’s had so much pain and spasms that she isn’t walking as much. It is also quite difficult for Dana to deal with bright lights, and she can’t spend much time on her phone or computer.

Dana has given so much to the Moz community, and to our industry as a whole. Her knowledge and generosity has helped marketers for many years, and now it’s our turn to return the favor. She’s in need of part-time caregivers, which cost $4,125 per month. That’s almost$50k for a year (…and that’s only part-time!). This doesn’t include paying for the multiple hospital stays, visits to the ER, physical therapy, occupational therapy, neuropathy treatment, and so on.

I’m asking you to help one of our amazing community members by donating to her medical fund. Every little bit helps, and you can even set up a monthly payment (I’m doing $25 per month). If you don’t have the means, please help us spread the word. It’s our turn to give back to Dana.

I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of Dana’s amazing work she’s done for the Moz Community, as so much of it remains great advice to marketers.

Stress-free Website Redesign for Search and Social

In September 2013, just two months before her accident, Dana presented an excellent webinar with us about how to make sure your search and social efforts don’t go to waste when you redesign a website. The full webinar is a little over an hour, but believe me, it’s worth the watch.

Rock Your SEO with Structured Social Sharing

At MozCon 2012, Dana was one of our very first Community Speakers to rock the stage. After seeing how well these presentations were received, we decided to continue the program each year. We’ve always been grateful to Dana for helping to make this so successful. In her presentation she discusses how to make your SEO even better by ensuring your social sharing is set up correctly. Give it a watch!

And if you’d like to just check out the slide deck, you can view that below:

If you have other ideas on how to get the word out and help our fellow community member, let’s hear it. Thank you all for your support and assistance.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!